No need to be vegetarian!

My gout has gotten very bad. It's in my feet, medicine has become ineffective (even cortisone), and the attacks last weeks at a time. In desperation I became vegetarian ... but that made me miserable so I started with the research. And I found a lot of misinformation and stuff that didn't work for me. But then I stumbled on a huge scientific study that really helped me. They studied the diet of over 47000 men without gout over 12 years. I'll put a link to the paper at the end ... it's a science paper so it's a tough read, but I'd encourage you to give it a look.

I'll summarize what I learned from it. Meat & seafood increases the risk of gout. (no surprise there)
Moderate intake of purine rich vegetables had no effect on gout. (I had read that as well) However, men who didn't have dairy in their diet had a much increased risk of gout. Moreover, men who had dairy had far less attacks. Since then I added dairy to my diet, and it has absolutely helped me.

But the biggest surprise wasn't listed in their conclusions, but if you scour through the data you'll find it. They noted in the individual meats they tested, only Beef / Pork / Lamb caused gout attacks. But they were tracking poultry too, and according to their data it didn't cause attacks! So I added poultry back in my diet, quite liberally. Not a single attack in 1 year. For me this means rotisserie chicken & turkey, chicken hotdogs, pulled turkey sandwiches, chicken bologna, etc. There's a lot of poultry products out there, so it's really broadened the menu for me.

Anyhow, this was a real game changer for me, so I wanted to share this in hopes it'll help others.

Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or scientist, just a guy suffering from gout. I'd also like to note that it's important to lower your purine levels. Just because poultry doesn't cause attacks doesn't mean it's not increasing your purine levels, so keep that in mind.

Strict lowering of purines diet can reduce uric acid levels by maximum 1 milligram and majority of the diets that do not contain purines are not palatable. Medication being taken regularly are much more important than diet alone. Restriction can lead to lesser flares. For further information regarding gout management , i can share an article that i wrote particularly on this subject. The link is given below.

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